I booked a day off from work on Friday (short-term contract, ends in a couple of weeks, hence no fanfair about finding a position post-graduation yet), and decided to make the most of the beautiful weather, especially since as of Friday morning, the RMT had yet to call off the planned rail strikes.

I wanted to have another stab at taking photos around the City of London, which in my past experience is notoriously difficult to do: poor natural light conditions, awkward as hell angles, and nothing particularly beautiful about the area at street level. However, as I tend not to visit the area, I figured I’d give it another go, and I ended up with three ok-ish photos. One highlighted the ‘glass canyon’ effect, and the other two were of the old Lloyd’s building. Truth be told though, unless I have real reason to go back to the area, I think I’ll give it a miss. It is truly a soulless husk of a district (what was I expecting really?).

After taking my fill of the City and surrounding zones, I headed over towards the new Battersea Power Station, where I was not expecting much, and yet still left dissappointed. Don’t get me wrong - the structural engineering, architectural skill and companion craftmanship that went into restoring the old power station is amazing, and I loved some of the structural reveals, one example shown below (which also highlights the beauty in the asymmetry that buildings can have). The surrounding architecture however was ugly as hell, and it didn’t feel like the monolithic building had much room to breathe. Then there is the ongoing argument over the merits of yet another luxury shopping mall and yet another set of unafforable empty apartments being used as assets rather than homes. To cap the day off, I walked back along the river towards Chelsea, with a view to visiting the Saatchi Gallery, but I wasn’t particularly taken with any of the (free) exhibits on show at the time. All in all, a good half-day’s worth of exercise, but it just reinforced for me the reasons why I have either never (in the case of Chelsea) or only twice (in the case of Battersea & the City of London) visited the areas. I was not particularly impressed with the aesthetic of the Nine Elms redevelopment area either as seen from Chelsea Bridge, and wow does the US Embassy stick out. Don’t know whether to applaud the boldness as an architectural metaphor for historical US foreign policy, or just shake my head. The solar shading system does genuinely look intriguing, and I understand the country’s desire to project itself, and its embassy as a citadel/bastion/bulwark, but I guess subtly has never really been America’s thing has it? Well, this ended up being a bit of a ranty blog entry… apologies.